Take heart, federal New Democrats: The pandemic-imposed parliamentary shutdown may have temporarily ended your ongoing efforts to use the daily back-and-forth in the Commons to pitch yourselves as an unabashedly progressive alternative to the minority Liberals, but your determinedly positive approach to the current public health crisis is getting rave reviews from the left side of the Canadian political mediasphere.

“One of the many unprecedented aspects of our current crisis is the way the federal party in power has been ready to quickly accept constructive suggestions from opposition parties,” he notes.

He acknowledges that “partisan political considerations should not be paramount during a crisis of frightening magnitude,” but argues that it’s “worth underscoring the success” that “Jagmeet Singh’s NDP has had in influencing key government policies and programs.”

“The NDP makes a suggestion and mere days later the Trudeau government adopts it.”

As he sees it, “never has an opposition party exerted so much influence on government policy in such a short time period,” which, he suggests, “is testimony to how minority governments can deliver the best results.”

The New Democrats’ “instrumental role” in pushing for increased aid for “poor, vulnerable and working class populations during the COVID-19 crisis” has also impressed Passage’s Christo Aivalis.

“At the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, it became clear that the existing EI model would be ill-equipped for the economic fallout,” he recalls.

“Singh called for the creation of a $2,000 monthly aid program for all Canadians in need. A few days later, the minority parliament negotiated an initial aid package that was substantially larger than what the Liberals had previously announced, in part because of the NDP’s efforts.”

“Conservatives are already maneuvering to recast the pandemic as a foreign threat exacerbated by a soft-headed and dangerously cosmopolitan liberal elite,” he notes, one that, in their view, should lead Canada to “disavow refugees, expand state authority and funnel public money into bailing out private capital.”

Although “the ever hapless Andrew Scheer has not done his party any favours with his open musing about whether income supports will discourage Canadians from returning to work,” Erwin-Longstaff suggests that “many conservative intellectuals anticipate that they will benefit from the fallout of the crisis in the longer term.”

“Sending children back to school ‘risks causing a sharp increase in the disease in the adult population,’ warns Quebec’s institute for public health in an April 22nd notice about COVID-19,” he notes — one that Quebec’s public health director nevertheless “seems to have disregarded” in favour of the “herd immunity” theory favoured by the premier.

“Are Arruda and Legault ready to take the risk of adults falling seriously ill when elementary schools reopen?”

Elsewhere on the site, Chinese Canadian National Council executive director Justin Kong teams up with Chinese Canadian Nurses Association of Ontario president Tsui Yee Wuto call for a “comprehensive strategy to ensure the supply and distribution of masks to frontline workers” while simultaneously “making sure the broader population, especially in large urban centres, also has full access to safe and effective masks.”

Rolling out such a strategy “will require a cultural shift,” they acknowledge, with “many people in Chinese and other Asian communities [having] faced scrutiny, abuse and at times outright violence for wearing masks since the beginning of COVID-19.”

Their proposed solution: “Our governments need to immediately initiate public education to combat stigma against mask usage while instructing the populace on appropriate and safe mask-usage methods.”

At one recent anti-lockdown rally in downtown Vancouver, “dozens of protesters surrounded a hospital entrance and began berating frontline healthcare workers,” PP reports.

“One protester shouted into a megaphone that they wanted to ‘talk to the doctors’,” while others “can be heard directing chants of ‘no vaccines’ and ‘let us in’ at several healthcare workers who wandered outside the emergency room in their protective masks and medical scrubs.”

The PP crew does, however, seem cautiously optimistic that the pandemic could lead to “major social reforms” in everything from labour rights to elder care.

“The next federal election could shape up to be a battle over what the ‘new normal’ in Canadian society should look like after COVID-19,” PP concludes, citing a fresh wave of polling data from EKOS.

“A clear majority of Canadians agree that the pandemic has exposed ‘ugly truths’ about how workers and the elderly have been treated in Canada under the old status quo,” while “70% said the pandemic is creating the conditions for major reforms focused on the ‘health and well-being’ of ordinary Canadian” versus the “30% [that] see a future that is “more authoritarian, stressing nationalism and security.”

Trending on the other side of the ideological divide:

Rebel commander Ezra Levantcharges to the defence of “great Canadian easy-listening rock star” Bryan Adams in the wake of his now infamous (and deleted) Instagram post that blamed the pandemic on ““****ing bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making greedy bastards.”

Rebel mission specialist David Menziestakes a day trip to Cornwall to meet Rebel Media Kelly Wheeler, who “actually paid around $700 to manufacture a gigantic reproduction of the cover of Ezra Levant’s best-selling #1 book, The Libranos: What the media won’t tell you about Justin Trudeau’s corruption,” which is now proudly displayed “on the wall of a building he owns.”